You’ve had it with making peach cobblers and plum preserves. Your coworkers are saying, “no thank you” to your offered bags of ripe fruit. You look out your window and sigh at all the fallen fruit underneath the trees, but just don’t have the heart anymore to go out and collect them. You secretly wish you had knocked off half the fruit when they first started growing in the Spring.

Now what are you gonna do?

Plum Granita and Peach Lime Ginger Granita

Except for a fig tree, we don’t have any fruit trees in our yard. However, our friends have a peach tree and a plum tree in theirs. When they invited us over last week for a swim and supper, they were only too happy to let us take their ripe fruit home as well.

At first, we ate them as is. Then as they started to soften, Annie made a couple of cobblers. Finally, they started to really get soft and the fruit flies started buzzing. We had to do something.

I looked up some recipes on making granitas and thought, “man, this is easy!”. Make simple syrup, puree peaches, freeze, scrape, eat. I think I can handle that.

As I was preparing to cook, I had an inspired moment. What can I do to riff off of the standard recipe? What flavor do I like with peach? I recalled that one of my favorite teas is Ginger Peach by Republic of Tea. There’s a sweet-spicy balance to it that I particularly enjoy.

So as I made the simple syrup, I sliced a thumb of ginger into slivers and boiled them along with the cup of sugar and cup of water:

Ginger-infused simple syrup

I cut up 6 large peaches and blended them in a blender, along with the slivers of ginger from the syrup. Then I strained the puree through a sieve. To the puree I added the juice of one lime:

Squeezing lime juice into peach puree

I added the ginger syrup to the puree, then poured the puree into a shallow dish that went into the freezer. After the mixture hardened, I used a fork to scrape it up into coarse granules.

Plum Granita

The plum granita recipe is a slightly different process. I cut up a pound of ripe plums in half, removed the pits, and boiled them with a couple cups of water and a half cup of sugar.

Recipe by David Lebovitz via MattBites.

After boiling for 8 minutes, I removed them to cool, then pureed them in the blender. Into a shallow dish and into the freezer it went. Once it was frozen, I did the fork scrape thing.

For some reason, the peach-ginger-lime granita came out with a better, more granular texture than the plum granita. The plum granita was more crystalline in structure.

The verdict? I can’t say. The peach granita was more sweet, and the ginger was a nice surprise. The plum granita was also sweet, but had a hint of bitterness at the end.

Both would be excellent and easy ways to deal with Summer’s bounty of fruit.

How do you deal with too much fruit in your backyards? Leave me a comment!

Aloha, Nate